LIKE any true professional, Michael O'Brien carries his career visual with him wherever he goes. Unfortunately, he doesn't really have a choice. As the doorman of a Tsim Sha Tsui East nightclub, O'Brien's list of career achievements isn't inked on to sheets of grey linen paper and tucked away in a crocodile briefcase - it's been sliced into his forearms, biceps, neck, head, abdomen and across his back.
On April 9, three young Chinese clubgoers attacked O'Brien with machetes, chopping him nine times. O'Brien defended himself barehanded against the swirl of silver blades and the barrage of Cantonese expletives. 'They cut me to the bone,' he says. At one point, he warded off a blow with his hand. 'My thumb was about to fall off. It was swinging off my palm,' he says. 'I've got me a tattoo of the boy Jesus on a cross on my back and they cut me right through it.' Sitting in a Wan Chai bar two months after the attack, O'Brien lifts his shirt to reveal pink wormlike scars all over his body like raised hieroglyphics. When decoded by club managers around the territory, the message on his body should read as a testament: only death would keep him from doing his duty as a club bouncer.
'People tell me I should be able to get a job as a doorman anywhere now,' O'Brien says. 'After I've shown what I'm willing to do.' Decoded by anyone else, the message scarred into O'Brien's body might read as a cautionary tale: the face of authority in the territory has changed colour.
IT WAS a Sunday evening on Chatham Road and the music from the club - Ace of Base, C & C Music Factory, Sharice - throbbed through the quiet streets. That night, O'Brien found himself manning the door alone. The 29-year-old had been working for the club for two weeks, having got the job through sheer luck: all the other doormen had left after a legacy of bad blood between them and some of the club's trendy young Cantonese erupted into violence.
'The guys were expected to know who the regulars were,' says O'Brien. 'But they couldn't recognise all of them ... which people were allowed in without cover charge; who had to pay.' When they demanded payment from one indignant regular, a brawl erupted in the lobby, sending the red velvet rope which divided the club from the rest of the world swinging wildly back and forth.
The doormen all walked out, and O'Brien walked in. 'For the kind of club this is, there really should be seven or eight of us downstairs, but that night there was only me,' he recalls. It was around 9.30 pm when three young men pushed their way to the front of the line and, without pausing to acknowledge O'Brien, jumped the velvet rope and ran up the escalator that leads to the club.
